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Social Web Bar Camp in Paris

After flying in from Berlin on Friday and celebrating the Jewish new year late into the night with Ori Pekelman, I woke up earlyish on Saturday to go to the Social Web Bar Camp organized in and by La Cantine, the very friendly Parisian conference, community, meeting space for creative people in the digital age.

At 10am the conference started and people slowly arrived for the freely available espresso coffee and pastries. The conference was free too, being sponsored by the member organizations of La Cantine. At 10:20am as the coffee had worked itself into the 60 or more attendees, Ori started the workshop (picture) by having everybody introduce themselves shortly by name and 3 tags. The Bar Camp rules of the game were then explained:

Everybody is a participant

You make the event

Feel free to move between sessions if you feel you are not getting what you were looking for at one of them

Write up your interests on the black board, this will be used to create the time table.

So the sessions were put together on the spot there and then.

Of course I put up a session on foaf+ssl and Distributed Social Networks on the black board, for the session starting at 11am.

After a last coffee, a little over 20 people gathered in the room. I connected the laptop to the projector, introduced myself and the W3C Social Web XG, before starting the presentation (slides in pdf) which I have been giving in various universities and hacker spaces around Europe for the past 5 months. (see the FrOSCon video for example)

A round table discussion of this size has a very different dynamic to conference presentations. It is a lot more free flowing and people can ask question and did as I went through the presentation, leading to lively discussions on security, identity and web architecture. At times it seemed in danger of veering off into widely philosophical discussions, but somehow we always got back to the topic helped by the real implementations of foaf+ssl that are now available. Somehow we did in fact manage to complete covering the subject by 12:30 including an excursion into a description of the very real business opportunities this enables.

From the twitter posts (tagged #swcp) and the invitations to follow up with other French public and private institutions that I got over the course of the day, I can only say that this conference was a great success. I could not have started my 1 month stay in Paris in a better way. I will clearly be very busy during the coming month, before my return to Berlin.